'For Colored Girls' Playwright Supports Bed-Stuy Block Association

BEDFORD-STUYVESANT — The poet and playwright whose work inspired the film "For Colored Girls" is performing on Friday, to help benefit a local block association.

Writer and Bed-Stuy resident Ntozake Shange will read poetry, while special guests perform music and engage in "provocative conversation," according to the Monroe Street Block Association 400.

Shange, who lives on Monroe Street, wrote the play "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf," a series of poems set to dance. The poems deal with problems facing black women.

The show went to Broadway in 1976, and in 2010, Tyler Perry adapted it into the movie "For Colored Girls."

Friday's will be at the Sugar Hill Supper Club, 609 DeKalb Ave., with host Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, an actress who has appeared in "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" and "Die Hard With a Vengeance." The show starts at 6:30 p.m., and tickets will be sold at the door for $25.

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